Updated With Teaser One Sheet!! These WORLD WAR Z (ombies) Are All Kindsa Fucked Up...

ET is running the trailer for WORLD WAR Z in a few days, and posted this tease for the material to whet our appetites.

I'll confess to never having subscribed to the notion that zombies must be cumbersome and lumbersome (i.e. 'slow moving') - that doesn't make much sense to me, even within an often nonsensical genre. I 'get' why it's creepy - from a 'vacant, back from the dead' / 'not-entirely-present-but-inexorable' sorta way, but...still...lurching and meandering doesn't seem the most imaginative way to fiddle with this long-standing conceit.

However, THIS interpretation of zombies? Would've never crossed my mind. It's freaky as hell...I quite like the viral/cancerous/biblical swarm nature of the these oncoming hordes. Not what I was expecting, but even this brief snippet of trailerness leaves me very curious to see more.

Directed by Marc Forster (QUANTUM OF SOLACE ***is*** good, you damn, nay-saying heathens!), this adaptation of Max Brook's book will be on screens next year!

Which is why every movie where he has a male co-star is usually good and any movie where he plays the romantic lead blows.
All of his best movies are Brad Pitt hanging out with other dudes.
Therefore, this might be good, since he has to ditch his wife at some point.

Yeah, the movement like a swarm of locusts is pretty freaky, but the zombies of the book are the inexorable marching type of zombies which I found freakier.
One scene in the book where a guy gets knocked out by a bomb that blows up a bridge, and wakes up to the wet splat of zombies slowly walking over the edge and falling to the ground below, continuing to try and get at the meat on the other side.
Very fucking scary.

They are walking dead...not running or whatever they are in this movie.
It is also suspense...not action that makes the zombies so scary.
We now live in a world where everything has to be fast and quick. Not thought out and intriguing.
Flash vs substance.

So what are we dealing with hear?
Some sort of army ant zombies?
Some sort of liquid zombies?
Whatever they are they quite possibly defy the laws of physics.
Film looks poop, like the poop that was stuck on the wheel of a certain memorabilia cart... but that's a story for another time...

My thoughts are if you are going to try to set a zombie in some sense of realism, aka a virus, then apply reason to other attributes. While zombie may start off strong because they don’t get out of breath or really feel pain, over time their bodies would break down due to bacteria and other infections rotting the body away.
It’s like the Portal video game series, although they change one rule of physics, everything else still applies.
Otherwise, leave it to be an unknown cause and let them run wild.

The movie where Bond tries to avenge the death of the girl from last movie, then goes instead after a guy who wants to sell water to a dictator (oooooh, evil), while M doesn't trust him until he attacks her and knocks her bodyguards out, while none of us can see what the fuck is going on, because the whole damn movie was edited by a hummingbird.
But apart from that, Marc Forster is a good director and that moving zombie pile looks actually like fun. I never read the book, only the ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE, which was a good joke, dragged out for way too long, so I got nothing to say about that.

The idea of zombies (real zombies according to genre) is that they are animated dead, Merrick. Meaning their bodies are decaying. So yeah, they move slow. At first maybe not but as their flesh rots and limbs fall off, etc. they move slower and with awkward gaits.

...am loathing everything I've seen and read about this. I don't even think the studio execs read (or had their peon assistants) read the book before greenlighting this abomination of a script.
They seem to have taken the title and left out everything that made the book riveting.
I think this would play better as a series, each week a different interview, a different flashback about what that person went through in the war. You'd never have to see the reporter, just his hand as he sets the recorder on the table at the beginning of the interview. There could even be crossovers and references to other people's stories and because each person only had a small piece of the information each version would be different.
I agree with previous posters, the zombies in this don't look realistic in their movements. Too c.g. and too much like Starship Troopers.
If you've ever seen "Zulu" the scene where the Zulu's attack the British is what I pictured the Battle of Yonkers like. This slow, never ending, relentless tide of zombies moving forward, never stopping and never retreating. Cordite filling the air and obscuring vision from the sheer number of rounds that have been fired. The soldiers beginning to panic as they continue to reload and reload and reload and then, one-by-one, start running out of magazines to reload and realizing how screwed they are. Play it out slowly and increase the drama, none of this "they swarm like locusts" bullshit.
This movie is going to suck ass, especially if you've read Max Brooks' book.
??Pseudo??
Out.

The one thing I NEVER bought into in Romero's movies was how by Day of the Dead they outnumbered the living by 400,000 to one. That was always completely unbelievable as they moved so slow law enforcement and/or the military could easily contain and neutralize the threat.
These zombies, moving like a swarm, would solve that problem. Only problem is the obviousness of the CGIwork-which pulls you out of the horror of the situation.

In Romero's films anyone who has recently died returns. You don't have to be bitten. So an average of 7000 new zombies every hour and those numbers increase as panic ensues and even more zombies are born out of that chaos. Each in turn biting someone.

I don't get it, people who have never read the book wont go and see it because of its title and fans of the book wont go a see it because it isn't the book they know and love!
Why not just call it generic zombie movie#649 and move on?
I am stumped as to why a studio would buy rights to a book then rewrite the shit out of it. I was a huge fan of the book but this is coming in about 4 years to late cos i'm zombied out now.
Judging by his hair and beard I can only hope that Pitts reprising his stoner character from True Romance (Clyde?) in this.
"Dont try an fuckin bite me man...I'll fuckin kill ya"
Oh, and fuck this.

... is that they are implacable, unstoppable and cannot be reasoned with. They give you time for the hopelessness of your situation to sink in, time to try desperately everything you can think of to get away, before finally falling on you.
<br>
They give you time to contemplate taking your own life, time to count your bullets and realise you've used them all up. They give you hope, and they give you the time to realise there isn't any.
<br>
The reason they work so well in world war Z - and this is laid out in plain English in the book - is that they come face to face with a war machine totally unprepared for an enemy that cannot be routed, has no concern for itself, and cannot be "hurt" into stopping. It is headshot or nothing. Reading about the massive technological might of the US military being forced to turn tail and panic in the face of a slow moving horde is chilling, made all the more effective by the slow realisation that *their plan isn't working*.

Yes, it's a teaser poster, but just sticking the movie's title and the name of the star in generic block font is fucking WORTHLESS as a marketing tool, which is what posters are supposed to DO...let the person walking through the theater lobby know what the movie is ABOUT.

Fuck you Pitt and everybody involved in this turd. You got handed a blueprint for the perfect Zombie Apocalypse movie and instead you wadded it up and threw it over your shoulder saying "What? I'm just a narrator? Fuck it, chicks wanna see me in a relationship."

Well, I thought Mr & Mrs Smith was pretty good.
Of course, it didn't match the sexual tension between Pitt and Jonah Hill in Moneyball.
Speaking of which, how come nobody ever says "Jonah Hill is gay" or Danny Devito is gay" or "Gene Hackman is gay" ?
You gay guys only want to claim the handsome, leading man types?

I still do not trust my unconventional allies...
But I digress!
ps. this zombie tidal wave is not what I was expecting. A brave choice but the actual application of it in these snippets looks... ridiculous. Maybe it might work better in the actual movie but first impression is not good.

This reminds me of those Mummy movies with Brenden Fraser with it's sloshy stop the movie in it's tracks cgi locusts.
I half expect the zombies to form the face of a giant Ben Kingsley (playing the villian)

Yes i agree that slow moving zombies are better, for many of the reasons you stated and also because they just never tired and don't need sleep, so even if they are slow, they will probably catch up with you eventually when you need to sleep or rest.

The book was a written like a combination of interviews and a history textbook. It was (11? can't remember offhand) more or less separate self contained stories that chronicles the beginning, the chaos, and the aftermath. You couldn't do a 2 hour movie like that and have it be either entertaining or at all comprehend able. To do that it would have had to be a miniseries.<P>
If you're surprised it doesn't follow the format of the book you are either naive or lack any understanding of how films are structured.

of the zombies in WWZ a bit too literally. Not sure what I think about this yet. I'm all for fast zombies, but these zombies are moving at Ludicrous Speed. That overturning bus shot definitely looks like the Battle of Yonkers, though.

Tomonaga Ijiro/Kondo Tatsumi storyline, which were some of the best parts of the book... Kondo escaping his apartment building and finding the sword, the blind Tomonaga taking on zombies in the wilderness, then meeting up with Kondo and staying behind to "cleanse" Japan. I would have watched a whole movie just about those two.

I mean, it's almost impossible to get fired from Hollywood. You could wander around public streets, snorting crack, knocking out hookers, in the nude, and all while you're two days late for being on set and you'd still have a job. But the original shoot was bad enough to get Marc Forrester fired, so I'm wondering if two months of re-shoots and a script re-write is enough to get back what must have been so shockingly bad that the Pentagon was probably interested in using it as a weapon of cultural mass destruction.

I'm not saying that he's gay as some kind of pejorative statement. But it's a theory as to why his films where he's a romantic lead are stale (The Mexican, Meet Joe Black, Benjamin Button) are kind of stale when put up against his more male-centric roles (Ocean's Eleven, Inglorious Basterds, Moneyball, 12 Monkeys, Fight Club). even Mr. and Mrs. Smith, to an extent, is about the disruption of heterosexual coupling - the married couple are trying to kill one another.

This looks terrible. But then again, from all reports, this is going to be nothing like the book, and the fact that the last half of the movie was pretty extensively re-shot and re-written says a lot. The cgi looked terrible too.

Having large groups of zombies is totally illogical, especially if zombiism is spread through biting or other close contact. You may be able to escape one or two of em, but once the zombie group reaches a certain critical mass, there will be nothing left of you to rise again as one of them. Just look at the bikers' fate in the original Dawn of the The Dead or the captain's fate in Romero's Day of the Dead.<br>
Now, you say in Romero's films that no matter how you die you will rise as a zombie. Unless there is something causing people to die en masse, people would quickly learn to solve this problem by decapitating or incinerating the corpse right away. You still would not end up with large groups of zombies, at least not in any civilized part of the world.<br>
Let's say that zombiism is caused by some kind of virus. Why wouldn't the zombies eat each other when they encounter another of their kind? If this virus is as fast-acting as the one in Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, then what does a zombie do if it's lucky enough to find someone to munch on all by itself, but the meal begins to rise a minute after it gets killed? Does the zombie stop eating and apologize to his new friend?<br>
Don't get me started on the 28 Days-Rage zombies. They're aren't dead, but they still seem to be able to get by without eating or drinking anything for quite some time. They are supposedly berserk killers yet they won't attack another infected; they are shown to be able to recognize other infected, sleep in groups and work together. And how would this virus spread when it causes an infected to attack a non-infected until dead, presumably? Again, just like with the undead zombies, the only people who would become infected would be those unlucky enough to get attacked and exposed but just lucky enough to get away.

I didn't watch any of this WWZ footage yet if there is any. I listened to the audiobook years ago and I can't see how it translates to a movie starring Brad Pitt, unless Brad Pitt is only in a small portion of it.

Some novels translate well to the big screen, others do not. World War Z would not translated well due to pacing issues, primarily.
Naturally, this is my opinion, and my opinion is that the trailer looks cool, and it might be a decent movie. Hate on it all you want, you're entitled to your own opinion just like anyone else. Me personally, I'll be seeing it.

...the way that they're spilling all over each other.
So, Hollywood just had to come up with some new CGI "zombie visual" to scare the loads of teenagers who will go see this crap...
It looks terrible.

I got genuinely creeped out and scared playing it last night, and I'm still in the part of the game when it's permanent tropical sun. I understand that in the next section there will be a day/night cycle.

but I hope they address and fix all its MANY issues in the upcoming Riptide sequel. I also can't wait to play the new Zombie mode in COD: Black Ops 2... the original was relentless, and is probably what a real zombie assault would be like (with the exception of 'unlocking' weapons/bonuses/etc).

like Masters of Horror: a different story from the book, with a different director each time. Can you imagine Scorsese directing the segment about Roy Elliot, the WWZ director who shot 'Fire of the Gods' & 'Battle of the Five Colleges'... and PLAYING the director as well? Ah, what could have been...

I get it people wanna be different and cool horay for you...but this book wasnt. running zombies to me personally dont work. And I get you cant have one of those "amazing" chase scenes with slow zombies but the scariest part of them is when their in a group slowly coming at you with no place to go but through them and if you run out of stamina or bullets your screwed I had really high hopes for this and they were all put down by this 27 seconds damn you film industry sometimes you can be a cruel bitch

This massive movement of zombies slowly lurching its way south and the army throwing missles and grendes and bullets at this hoard and realizing blowing them up isnt doing anything and it just keeps coming and coming thats what we should see not fast zombie tidal wave

You mean "worst" surely. I have no idea who you are but I find it funny that you always seem to get annoyed by my post. In fact, I only post to irritate you. I'm actually Daniel Craig's agent.
Ooh, Peter wants Bond to be pretty. He wants Justin Beiber to be Bond. Boo hoo. Anyway, please continue with your weird strangely homophobic ramblings.

The lack of a clear narrative. Terrible villain. Awfully directed action scenes. Rubbish plot holes. Stupid logic leaps like randomly crashing the plan into a cave leading straight to the villains secret. The exploding hotel in the middle of nowhere. Horrible. So bad. Tiers and tiers of shit.

it's exactly like we thought - inception braaawwm noises, one man can save the world, super athletic zombies. what a fucking joke. max brooks must be spinning in his chair/bed/shoes/existence every moment knowing this even exists.

Reading that script, I never got the impression that the zombies moved this fast. This is ridiculous.
Add to that the fact that Brad Pitt had to be made out to be more of a hero saving the world, looking for a zombie cure or something just makes me more worried. Then this trailer comes along with coke-fueled CGI zombies...

It was unique because of how it treated the socio-political situation of a zombie virus unleashed upon 21st Century civilization.
One of the big points of the book, which if Brad Pitt is now the hero that can single-handedly save the world, was that the zombie outbreak got so bad because of the ignorance and laziness of the powers that be waiting until too late to do much about the growing hordes of zombies.
That was like the first major point of the fucking book. That was why the classic slow zombie concept was even more important to the story. Had the US, Europe, China, and maybe a few other nations with a decent military/infrastructure gotten off their asses and faced these undead things head on, then it wouldn't have gotten as bad as it did. That is why in the book, there is this bit where they have to institute the Redeker plan, which basically says you choose a certain amount of the population to flee to a safe zone, but then you leave little pockets of civilization barricaded in a single area (small town, military base, etc.) to act as bait/distraction for the zombie hordes. It then gives the rest of the populace time to set up more permanent safe havens and begin to make plans to fight back.
Fast zombies makes all this seem moot, because you just wouldn't be able to enact this type of plan. These swarming rage zombies would spread too fast, and wouldn't allow for large groups of the populace to escape to safe zones.
Finally, the whole insect swarm thing was in the book, but only as a fucking metaphor used to describe how the zombies sometimes clustered together. They didn't actually move like ants in a massive swarm, tumbling over one another and blending into a massive sea of flailing arms and legs. Fuck me. The book had a great way of illustrating this too, while keeping the notion of the Romero style slow zombie. In the book, one segment is the account of an astronaut on I believe the ISS. He and a few others were stuck up there for years after the zombie outbreak reached across the globe, meaning he and his fellow astronauts couldn't get back down to Earth. He talks about how they observed stuff from way up in orbit. One of the things this character describes is how massive herds of zombies would form on the great plains, miles wide and long, just moving slowly across the nation. That is freaking disturbing and still retains the slow zombie concept. Why not just show that? Or should I say, hopefully they'll show that kind of thing in the film. That is unique, but hyperactive CGI zombie swarms out of I Am Legend or The Mummy are not.

This goes back to the problem with the giant ant movie 'Them'. Yes, ants are awesome and strong and brave and ruthless but it's a mistake to think that a ten foot ant is the most scary thing. A movie about ten inch ants would be more scary because the true terror of ants lies in their swarming group attack. If ant's were just a little bigger they would start to target people so you don't need a ten foot ant.
Zombies and zombie movies are fascinating because of the exponential viral multiplication. They are dead and lumber but overwhelm with numbers.
I do love the scean when they tip the bus over but sprinting and 'flowing' up a wall just makes them look ridiculous so less scary.
The makes of this film forgot why zombies are scary and just made them generic monsters.

I can live with fast moving zombies, but these are like fast mutant monkey zombies. Who in the hell could survive against them?
Not to mention the CGI looks like utter crap. It's like something out of The Mummy.
At least we have The Walking Dead. This looks like complete garbage.

There are exactly three brief shots in a 30 second clip with absolutely no context whatsoever, on a miniscule little screen on a webpage, and suddenly everyone has written the CGI off as looking "like shit". How about we wait for some more footage or a higher resolution? You can't tell shit about the CGI at the quality (and quantity) we have now. You people are fucking ridiculous.

dead
decaying
muscle loss due to necrosis and rot.
obvious reasons why a dead creature wouldn't run as fast as a living creature.
fire the writer, he's a dud. shoot the director, he's worse.
even my non-geek wife went "WTF, OVER."
VOTED: (FAILURE!!!)

I can easily see Fincher's dark aesthetic working for WWZ. Also, I doubt Fincher would make the undead a mass of hyperspeed CGI silliness.
People keep saying they want Fincher to do a Star Wars, but we needed him on WWZ.

The series Day By Day Armageddon is pretty good, and could actually be translated to the screen with very few alterations to the story and characters.
Seriously, while the novel of WWZ is massive in scope, Day By Day Armageddon is much more intimate in terms of focusing on a streamlined survival story and only a few characters. I've only read the first book, but there is already one sequel novel and another on the way. So right there they've got plenty to work with if they want a franchise.
As far as zombie stories go, Day By Day Armageddon is perfectly suited of the big screen, while WWZ should have been a 10-12 episode HBO miniseries.

As I said, you don't get fired in Hollywood. What I was saying may have sounded like a joke, but take a minute and you'll realize it's not an exaggeration at all. Heck, M. Night Shamylan is still around, that's how bad at firing anyone Hollywood is.
But, Forster (sorry) did get replaced as director, for the eight weeks of emergency re-shoots. 8 god damned weeks, with an entire script re-write, AFTER the movie was "done" shooting. That's just got to be horrible bad.
Also, anyone that considers Quantum of Solace a good movie needs to be forcibly shoved back into their own alternate reality. The reality of... terrible movies or wherever it is they're invading from.

Let me just join the chorus of right thinking individuals:
Why the fuck would you license a book and then fuck it up? Why use the title and alienate all its fans. If the had just had the guts to write an original zombie movie (as they obviously FUCKING WANTED TO), I MIGHT have actually watched this movie on its own merits. Now, I can't be fucking bothered. To Netflix with you!

I watched this again a few days ago, for the first time since I saw it in the cinema.
Man, it fucking *blows*. It think I might even rank it as my least favourite Bond movie of all time. The action scenes are SO INCREDIBLY BORING. The ski chase scene actually had me laughing at its ineptness.
Quantum of Solace, while not great, is better than both TWINE and DAD, and arguably better than TND. I think people slate it purely in a relative sense, i.e. comparing it only with Casino Royale, not judging it against the James Bond average.

Hate to be negative, but Merrick ain't au fait (or even qualified to talk) about the true heart of zombie mythology if he's questioning the 'slow' zombie and praising these locusts instead.....
This film might end up being really cool, but please don't take a dump on Romero's aesthetic / narrative legacy just coz some 'new' zombie flick sprints/swarms along....it's kinda VERY disrespectful to George and the groundwork he laid for us all to enter the zombie apocalypse....
Gonna set Bub on anyone who disses the slow zombie. See how you get away from HIM!.....

...but as someone who has read the book, there is nothing worse and more disrespectful to the spirit of the source material than having only one man able to save the world. It's tacky, it's cliche and more importantly it takes away from the point of WWZ, that it's an event that affects everyone in different ways from every walk of life.
From that creative mistep to the bullshit surrounding forster (who after the shitstorm that was QOS, which wasn't a terrible film, but an absolute failure as a bond film, truth) and the slightly cool but ultimately over cgi'ed swarm of zombies. I'm led to believe this will go down as one hell of a bomb for Pitt and zombie films in general.
Real shame because the book is amazing.

Perhaps WWZ is the new IAL? A book that Hollywood seems to fawn over, yet never actually adapts, but only uses the very basics of the premise and title.
Even then, they sometimes change the title. This film is more The Omega Zombies (in more ways than one) than it is WWZ.

a good question, why buy the rights to a book and then basically ignore most of it for some bullshit script instead? I guess name recognition but surely it can't be that much of a factor for many books.
I'm sure I saw or read an interview with Richard Matheson, author of I Am Legend, where he expressed his slight confusion as to why Hollywood kept using the rights to his book and then kept changing the story. He basically said they must just think the name's cool.

If the reports of WWZ's script changes are correct, then we very well might be seeing Brad Pitt's character running around looking for a cure to stop the zombunami.
So basically dommi'sinnerchild came up with the perfect title for this:
I, Zombie II: I Am Legend Too

Hearing there was going to be a WWZ movie was the best movie news I had heard in a long time. If they had at least kept the basic premise of "journalist travels the world hearing recollections of zombie apocalypse" I would have been willing to swallow so much other shit. You could have crammed it full of unfinished CG zombies committing PG-rated acts of violence accompanied by an all Nickelback soundtrack and I would've been there at the first midnight showing.<P>
But fuck this. Fuck this so hard. This is the most crushing movie disappointment I can think of.

I don't think the CG zombie armies look bad?
The PG-13 side of it sounds dumb, but I think the hate on the Zombie Waves is a little unfair.
It will probably be over used but I think it looks fantastic.
As far as the movie goes... meh...

The story was pretty much just a character study of Bond, which is interesting but doesn't really keep the momentum from Royale going. But its worst crime is that on a pure action/spectacle level, it was terrible. Incoherent beyond belief. Hey remember during the boat chase action scene, at the end two boats kind of collide and one of them kind of flips way up into the air (Last Crusade nazi motorcycle style)? Can anyone here actually explain the elements that create that boat flip? Because I have seen that scene three times and I still don't understand. Something about an anchor getting caught on something, but the language of the action just never really lays it out in a way that the viewer can follow.

This reminds me of that abortion of a film, Will Smiths 'I Am Legend' with those CGI crapfest infected swarming about. I think zombies as a tidal wave is probably one of the most stupid ideas i have ever seen and would gladly denounce this film.

WWZ book spoiler
-----------------
The quislings were un-infected humans so broken down psychologically from witnessing the horrors of the Zompocalypse, that they start to act like zombies and attack other living people.
With this speed freak blur of zombie tsunami action, you can't really have stuff like the quislings mixed in. First of all they wouldn't survive the insane speed of these swarming zombies. Second, the audience won't be able to tell if there were non-infected people in these hordes. It's all a big fucking mess.
Another thing that fucks over the type of terror in the WWZ book is that the soldiers or civilians facing off against the undead hordes will sometimes describe how they could see specific details about some of the zombies they kill. That is because when you have slow or normal speed zombies specific details about that zombie can be observed. When you have a blob of flailing bodies you can't properly show the horror of the human body breaking down from the zombie infection. All that great kind of body horror, which The Walking Dead does so well is now lost for WWZ.

The Battle of Yonkers was what differentiated WWZ zombies from what we've seen before, because even with machine guns, flamethrowers, tank shells, and high explosives dropped from the sky, they still kept coming.
In every other zombie story I've seen, napalm and high explosives were never portrayed as useless. WWZ was different.
That's what made WWZ zombies so badass. They didn't need to be Rage Zombies, let alone Tsunami Zombies.
Max Brooks should be ashamed for selling the film rights without demanding a say.
Say what you will about the flaws in The Walking Dead, but Robert Kirkman didn't sell out nearly as cheaply as Max Brooks has.

If there can be multiple cop shows on tv at the same time, multiple hospital shows on tv at the same time, or multiple sitcoms about 20-somethings hanging around their living rooms and drinking coffee, surely there can be two zombie shows at the same time.

That's one of the things I admire most about the book. Max Brooks tries to address most of the little things that don't make sense about zombies, like how they stay animated for so long without decomposing.
Ok, I had one last one in me.

Which means the whole concept described in the latter portions of the book with the lines of soldiers using calm and cool shooting techniques to take down the undead, all that is useless now.
Which points to the Brad Pitt finds a cure and saves the world scenario that this film is supposedly taking.

..who ejects into the desert. This wont be in the film i take it? In fact will any of the stories be used? I doubt it.
One thing confuses me, obviously the zombies are now fast moving, but what about the time it takes for someone to become a zombie? The book hinged on th fact that infected people were travelling freely before the authorities could act. Some of the best images from the book for me was cruise liners becoming floating zombie havens, eventually dritfting ashore or zombies walking for miles along the bottom of the ocean and stumbling onto beaches around the world.
WWZ showed what would happen in a world wide zombie situation, from massive set pieces to small incidents that snowball out of control.
I've never hoped for a film to fail, and i hope i'm wrong, but if the rumours and trailers are anythng to go by this could be straight to dvd!!!

I'm pretty sure the actual title is "World War ZEE," firstly because no American I've ever met pronounces Z like "zed," and secondly because the title is supposed to be a pun that rhymes with World War III, which doesn't work the other way (unless you limey freaks also say "thred").

Wait, whaddaya mean they can' headshot them? The book pretty explicitly states that, after the virus has taken effect, the brain is the only part of the body necessary for survival, which is why they're the slow, shambling types. Get rid of the brain, and you kill the zombie.

I mean, I can understand a couple deviations from the book, but is this supposed to be nothing but the Battle of Yonkers? What made the book great was it's slow, tense, logical approach to the living dead.
Actually, having it be nothing but that one battle, and revealing at the end that it's nothing but Brad Pitt's character telling Brooks the story might make for a good twist. It opens possibilities to make sequels, and then we could get the anthology that we deserve.
Also, this is what you get for not seeing Dredd.

The book's cover pretty much WAS that. What made it a good cover, while this looks bland and ordinary?
Grit.
WWZ's cover wasn't much to look at, but it got the tone across: subtle smatterings of blood, the military-like font, the orange/yellow-ish color and worn feel that made it look like it had been through Hell and back. Precisely what the book was:Going through Hell and coming back.
Now, what can we gather from the teaser that we have here? Let's see... There's silver.There's black. The font's average. The "O" looks a little stylized, like a wedding ring. Brad Pitt's Name is on it.
All this points to the notion that this movie's gonna be shit.

Long time Zombie fan here. Love the Walkin Dead series. Lookin at the snippet- three or four times- seems they've gone the recent Dawn/Day of the Dead remake route of fast moving Zombies. The "zombies" in this clip look crazy and manic and if there's loads of them in one area and in an attacking frenzy, why wouldn't they look like marauding insects, all falling and piling over each other?? Quite a disturbing thought actually!

I like Brad Pitt, but I don't see how he could have so much professed love for this book to spearhead this project and have it get mangled up like this. The book had so many moments of real, slow-burn, human tension that didn't even need zombies in the scenes to make you feel the dread and I don't sense any of that here. I'm willing to wait on this until we get an idea of how the story is being told. That clip could be cut in a way to make it seem like Pitt is in every scene, but they could still make this work by inserting him into a few of the scenes to show how he lived it, but also have him basically telling the stories of others as well. That could work, but it just don't see that story being told here.

...it's put me in mind of a terrific series of British books that I would love to see made: Charlie Stross' "Laundry" series.
The Atrocity Archives would be awesome. Imagine seeing an alternate-earth through a portal where all starlight has been sucked out by an interdimensional Lovecraftian horror, all because the Nazis won World War II with advanced math (magic), and the moon has Hitler's face laser-carved into it.
Plus, it's funny!

This looks like an hour and a half of zombies falling sideways and being thrown at each other. There's a vast disconnect between their seeming swarm mentality and their actual mobility.
Ants coordinate. But the physical animations of the zombies in these clips show them tumbling, stumbling, kicking each other down...they don't look like ants, they look like a literal tide of bodies.

While yes I never imagined Zombies being done in that force of nature tidal wave type way. Which actually is very cool, I just cringe at the sight of CGI Zombies. I definitely agree that Zombies don't have to be slow & lumbering. Especially because in reality to me it doesn't make sense as to how you could be overun by them. But I'm leery of the CGI application.

...are like drinking decaf coffee with powdered creamer and artificial sweetener. What exactly is the point? I agree that PG13 works for certain films and genres — The Avengers would not work as an 'R'. But horror movies? ZOMBIE horror? To be horrifying, you must demonstrate what it is that makes them so. Zombies eat people. If they're going to demonstrate bloodless, less violent Zombie deaths that merely suggest the horror instead of presenting it, then what you're left with is a movie that is horrible, not horrifying. The studio's excuse is that they want more asses in seats than they would get with an 'R' movie, not seeming to understand that by making a bad, watered-down zombie movie saddled with the cowardly PG, they will be getting less asses in seats than with the more honest R they are avoiding. Don't water down my horror.

Why does this movie even have a plot? How is it called WOrld War Z? Where did they get this plot from? Because it is not in the book, and that looks nothing like the book. Why didn't they just call it something else?

If they've truly rewritten the story to let Pitt single-handedly save the planet, then I will definitely skip this movie.
It's World War Z in name only!
Congratulations lv_426, you have succeeded in depressing me.

...I don't even LIKE zombie films for the most part, but come on--that's cardinal rule territory, isn't it? If you can't shoot them in the head to kill them, then they're NOT zombies! They're Autons or something!
Then again, after the tidal wave (Biblical flood?) thing, why am I even surprised?

as that is the way you pronounce it no? Over across the pond (where we fuckin spawned the language) pronounce the letter Z as Zed not Zee...So the book/film reads as World War Zed which sound alot like World War Dead.....So there you fuckin go!

Let's play pretend. You have the option of buying the rights to a book that is already extremely popular, is on bestseller lists, and is on a subject (zombies) that is hot right now. Do you:
A) Buy the rights and hire someone to faithfully adapt the book, knowing that your audience is already built-in and (being a genre audience) would probably rage pretty hard if you significantly changed the story.
or...
B) Buy the rights then immediately change absolutely everything but release it under the same title because name recognition is king and you don't give a fuck about the fans?
Good going, Hollywood! I salute you for almost always, without fail, choosing "B".
Worst part is that a faithful World War Z adaptation would have been amazing to see and would have been successful. This trailer makes the movie a late night download at best. I will not spend money to see this.

Studios are profit-making entities. They do not want to do anything that doesn't make a profit. They are terrified of innovation. They are last-place lowest-common-denominator entities.
For a moment, consider Justin Bieber. Yes, really. Justin Bieber becomes a popular singer, and then someone makes a perfume with his name on it.
Now, do you honestly think that the perfume company really wanted to connect the perfume to Justin beyond the retail opportuntiies? Of course not - there as no legitimate reason to seek him out to design a perfume. Rather, by putting Justin's NAME on it, they know they can make a profit. There is literally ZERO concern on the part of the perfume manufacturer to be somehow true to Justin Bieber's understanding of smells as it were in making this perfume. It has his name because that will sell.
Studios, shockingly enough to apparently everyone here, do the same thing with books.
Do you honestly think anyone involved with optioning the book WORLD WAR Z had an interest in being true to the nature of the book? It's the same as optioning Justin Bieber's name for a perfume. WORLD WAR Z as a book was a success, so the studio optioned it and turned it into a movie. Whether a movie resembles a book is happenstance. What the studio is buying is the NAME. They know that just as girls will buy a perfume with Justin Bieber's name on it, people who liked WORLD WAR Z the book will show up for WORLD WAR Z the movie because of the name, because it's a familiar name they've been told is popular and well-liked and different from other books because it's popular and well-liked.
They bought the name.
This whole debacle is easily explainable. Right now, every studio is cynically trying to make the next AVATAR for a thousand dollars. All a producer sees when he looks at AVATAR is that people went for the 3D (hence the wave of failed sci-fi 3D projects we're JUST now tumbling out of) and flicks like THE DARKEST HOUR with hordes of CGI monsters. Nobody involved truly understands why people enjoyed AVATAR (to be honest, I don't understand why people enjoyed AVATAR - I thoguht it was absolutely dreadful). They know it had something to do with pictures of organic waves of critters moving around a lot.
To understand a producer's mindset, you have to think a bit like an insect, or with an insect's cold perceptions. View a movie entirely in terms of its marketability. Ignore ANY emotional response. Simply look at the surface and see what so-called WORKED and you get the producer mindset. Hey, that movie was successful. It had skulls on the poster. GET SKULLS ON THE POSTER OF OUR MOVIE NOW!
WORLD WAR Z as it looks in these ill-advised trailer/poster spots is easily explainable if you understand this. There's a flash-sizzle CGI effect, weird zombies (that's different, it'll sell!) flying around and moving quick like those TRANSFORMERS robots moving quick and looking hard-to-define - zero attention-span audience needing to be told the zombies are scary, none of those old-fashioned bad from-the-past slow zombies, it's new it's new it's new flash sizzle GO GO GO and the studio's likely absolute ironclad insistence that ONE HERO MUST RISE and that HERO is BRAD PITT and there you go, you get exactly what this is presenting.
EASY.
Painful.
But easy.
People are horrible.

Why the hell do British have a silly accent and Californians speak clearly with generally no accent (which is why they get all the news gigs)? Shouldn't it be the opposite with the clearer language being the origin and not the furthest away region (which you figure would be the area it potentially evolves into a new language)?

First of all, none of us has seen any more than a few seconds of this flick flashed here and there and we're all going on and on about the moving hordes flowing all over.
I actually kind of like it. We've seen slow movers, we've seen fast movers and we've seen every other kind of zombie until frankly the concepts over played.
For all any of us knows, they are the slow movers of the book - from what I can see you're seeing attempts to contain people and zombies in areas. These could easily be shamblers and slow movers who just mass up in these zones constantly growing in numbers until they literally spill out in a wave (literally) as they try like ants to climb, bash, push their way out.
That - actually - is pretty terrifying the concept that enough of a mass of these things would literally spill out like a wall of moving undead flesh climbing over itself as it goes...
Is it CGI and too fast? Yeah - but it's a new and different take that hasn't been shown before. It allows for slow movers and medium movers and shamblers.
From the look of the Zombie coming after Pitt in the one semi-decent close up of one we get - it doesn't appear to be some rotting corpse but a freshly dead, the eyes have barely turned and there's some kind of thought or something there which... in it's own way is creepier the idea that yeah, there is something going on in there - - and it's all about killing and eating you.
Not a troll but really tired of people 2nd, 3rd, and 10th guessing something from 5 seconds of flashed images none of us can accurately determine as what it's really going to look like.
Frankly I'm not likely to see it. It's zombie flick and I detest the concept of the zombie as a 'horrorifying' anything. It's a human - it dies if you put a bullet in its skull. Realistically, if it was really dead, it would barely be able to move in a matter of hours. Without being able to breath it couldn't provide oxygen to it's muscles which are what allows them to function on a chemical level by blood pumping oxygen to them so ... what you'd have is a mass of things flopping around for a few hours, then rotting. Dumbest idea ever ... now if they're some how mystically or technologically that's something else... but most fall on the trope its some kind of virus that kills and reanimates the dead which... ain't gonna happen. Ever.

You are absolutely correct - I meant "worst". Thankfully you are better at correcting grammatical errors than you are at judging James Bond actors. And "weird strangely homophobic ramblings"? Not at all. I have no problem with homosexuals at all. I believe you should be who you are. Is that why you tend to focus so much on Craig's looks when you criticize his Bond films? If that's the reason, then I certainly apologize for being insensitive. And don't worry - I'm not bothered by your posts at all. So keep 'em coming, my friend! And please tell your client, Mr. Craig, that for me his Bond is second only to Sean Connery.

The zombie film was always distinct from the main horror genre because it literalised creeping death. 28 Days Later and it's American remake, Dawn of the Dead 2004, were great horror films with a lot of action, but weren't really zombie films. ROTLD managed to have fast zombies and still be a zombie film by having a pungeant aura of death in every scene.
The hordes here look fast but not scary and not remotely human - a bad idea. Reminds me of I AM LEGEND, where all the villains used the exact same video game sprite. EUGH!

What a shame.... I read the book nonstop because I found it so interesting looking at it from a historical perspective. When I heard Pitt was cast the first thing that came to my mind was Interview with a "survivor." How are you going to have a firing line of one shot one kill army that exists only to make headshots in this mess? It's like the took stuff from I Am Legend and pieced it together to make this.

Read it about a year ago. First thought, no way are they making a movie starring Brad Pitt out of this. Second thought, would make a kick ass TV series.
But, they could make a 2 hour narrative set in the book's world. The best parts of the book were how the humans adapted to fighting a slow moving yet relentless zombies. They talk a great deal about War and how a nation only gets good at fighting the previous war and how every new war presents new challenges and you have to learn how to fight all over again.
The book is about how humans adapt and overcome and survive. I'm afraid this is just going to be about how Brad Pitt fights to save his family from a swarm of Jamaican sprinting zombies.

First off, an issue with the very small synopsis we have in and of itself. The little snippet they gave us says that Pitt's travelling around the world [In order to find a cure]. However, at the bit with the shetou, he pretty explicitly states that "they probably thought there was a cure in the West. Most infected did", which implies there's no cure to be found.
There's a fine line between making a few changes to a book to better translate to screen and COMPLETELY SHITTING ALL OVER IT. Needless to say, that line's been crossed multiple times over.

In 1968 NOTLD, you could understand slow moving zombies taking over the world, bodies of the recently dead rising, around 3,000,000 people die each week, so it`s plausable, also you shout zombies back then, hardly anyoneone would know about destroying the brain.
2012, slow moving zombies, everyone knows to go for the head, grabbing the nearest blunt heavy object to crack some skulls. Fast moving zombies, ups the ante and keeps the survivors on their feet, the horde effect, just running towards fresh meat, falling over themselves to get to you, remember, they just want to eat you, no slow dance you to your graves whilst whispering sweet nothings into your half-eaten ear :) :) Zombie films haven`t been overdone, apart from a few exceptions, they`ve just been done rather badly.

My view exactly.
Looks kinda interesing. The book has hoards of thousands and even millions of zombies.
The scale looks to be massive on this. As long as the fx dont suck too badly, these could be a good watch.

In the Resident Evil: Code Veronica game there's a scene where you find a zombie doctor eating the stomach of his patient. You shoot the doctor and literally the second after, his patient rise up and you realize he was a zombie the whole time, he just didn't seem to care enough to sit up until you walked into the room, even when he was being eaten. That always freaked me out for some reason.

I don't know what the hell this flippy-shit CGI they're doing in this is. It was actually comical, especially the scene with them all just flipping over each other on the stairs. They're supposed to be zombies, not ticks. The human body would not allow for that sort of thing to happen. Living or not (and that "zombie" on the roof looks like a regular living person, just angrier), you can't have a hundred people flip over on another without breaking every bone in their bodies.
I really hate the final third of the WWZ book, but wow, it looks like a masterpiece compared to this.

There is even a shot of some of the rage infected slowing down after running after the car in the tunnel, just as anyone who runs flat out for a bit can get winded and has to slow down.
I like that they kept that kind of thing in there.
The ant swarm waves of zombies in WWZ is just way over the top. That is why it looks fucking stupid. Not merely because they aren't slow shambling zombies.

I don't know for sure, but that is the just of the more recent synopsis, after they announced all the script changes and reshoots.
Either way, the point of the book was that the framing device of the UN investigator all took place in the post Z war era, but allowed us to relive the outbreak and war via the survivor's stories.
The first WWZ script by J.M. Straczynski kept this angle, making the Pitt character an investigator that goes around collecting stories and data about the war from survivors. It also had some flashbacks to Pitt's character, named Gerry, and his hardships during the dark years of the Z war. The script cut out a decent amount of info and other stuff from the book, but it actually captured the structure and most importantly the spirit of the book. It also didn't mention zombie tsunamis either. I'm sure some Hollywood suit thought it would be *relevant* to make the zombie hordes appear like a tidal wave, to draw allusions to the hurricanes and tsunami tragedies of recent years.
As for a cure being mentioned, in the WWZ book there is an element of that, but nothing like what this movie seems to be going with. In the book the cure is a fake, and was cooked up by Wall Street assholes and big pharma to profit off of scared people who needed any shred of hope and as they saw the coming terror on the news, as the zombie outbreak started in China in the book.
Anyone interested in the J.M. Straczynski WWZ script, here you go (PDF link is below the poster image).
http://www.zombiefiend.com/forum/topics/world-war-z-original
Also, the audiobook adaptation of WWZ is excellent. It does cut out some bits from the book, but not all that much. It is great for a vacation or road trip.